of gray-haired "youth" bureaucrats. I see its goal, I think, in much broader terms as the beginning step to open our entire political process to greater participation by young people.

The Presidential Scholars, the White House Fellows, the intern program, the young men and women in high positions in Government, those young folks like Alan Boyd, Ramsey Clark, and others who now sit in the Cabinet, all of that means that young people are participating in the decisions of their Government. And the more of them we can arouse and the more of them we can incite and the more of them we can inspire, the more we can stimulate, the better off government is going to be.

All of your recommendations are interesting and some can work out easier than others. I have already acted on one. Last week, I asked all of the departments to create a special committee to evaluate their training programs for young Federal employees.' I urged that the key element in their review process should be the participation of young people. As you pointed out, this just has not been done before.

Your suggestions for duplicating the White House Fellows Program on the local and State level is of great interest to me. Tom Johnson brought that to the attention of the Nation this morning in his television appearance. I am asking Governor Daniel, who is our liaison with the Governors of the States, and the Vice President, who represents us with the mayors, to transfer your recommendations to the Governors and to the mayors.

I would like to see every mayor and every city in the country have some program that was patterned after this one so that we could get young folks involved at the local level. I would like to see every Governor of every State do the same thing. What they do, of course, is a matter up to them.

Beyond the specific actions you have recommended here, certain other ideas have come to mind. Perhaps during the transition period, there might be a meeting here in the White House bringing together a wide variety of student leaders to discuss their ideas and to ask their suggestions as to the next steps that should be taken by the new President.

After I came into the White House, I asked the State colleges in every State in the Union to have their student presidents and their student editors and some of their student leaders that had been selected by the students themselves, to send them here for a meeting. We thought that was helpful. I am sorry we have not had more of them. We should have. I quite agree with you that we are not communicating with the youth as well as we should and, vice versa, they are not communicating with us.

I think the new President is going to discover, as I have, that the White House Fellows Program can be a very valuable resource. You have made it very clear to me that you have a very solid background of accomplishment. You have gained great experience in the Government. Now, through this report of the White House Fellows Association, I think you have shown that you are an effective body for working on unsolved problems and rather difficult problems. I hope that the White House Fellows and your Association will continue for many years in

1 For the President's memorandum asking agencies to create the committees, see the issue of October 14, 1968 (4 Weekly Comp. Pres. Docs., p. 1474).

the service of America. I hope the Presidents who follow me will try to improve on this bare-bones beginning that we have made here.

Unless I can get all of you to go to Texas with me, I look forward to hearing from you and about you. I do not exaggerate when I say to the White House Fellows that I think you have great promise. As I told Mrs. Johnson, when Lyn and Lucinda first vote, I hope they will be voting for a member of this Association.

You may observe that I am already not only interested in the voting processes of younger people, but I am also trying to recruit new members for youth.

MRS. JOHNSON. I love this very much. Thank you all, more than I can say. For what is now almost 5 years that we have been in this house, there have been dozens and dozens of state dinners and always at the center of the table a bowl like this sits with beautiful flowers in it. It is one of the pictures of the White House that I will always take away in my mind. I am just so very happy to also be able to take away the bowl.

One other slight touch to let you know how much I do value it. Some time ago, I suggested to Bess that this would make really just the right present when we have a visiting king and queen or prime minister and his wife. So, this has often been our main state gift to visiting dignitaries from far away.

Thank you so much. I want to keep up with all of you White House Fellows. It has been one of the most exciting things about my stay here, knowing you all and your work.

NOTE: The President spoke at 5:35 p.m. in the Cabinet Room at the White House. The President and Mrs. Johnson, as "founders and sustainers of the White House Fellows Program," were presented with a vermeil bowl in a bamboo motif from the White House Fellows, 1965–68.

36. NATIONAL COUNCIL ON THE ARTS

The President's Remarks at a White House Reception for the Council. November 21, 1968

Members of the Arts Council, ladies and gentlemen:

Mrs. Johnson and I have very much wanted to meet with the National Council on the Arts at least one last time to thank each of you from the bottom of our hearts for all that you have done to help your country.

As you all, I am sure, realize and as Mr. Stevens implied, artists and politicians have not always been too comfortable together.

One American President once looked at a painting and handed down this judgment. "If that's art," he said, "I'm a Hottentot."

But the American people thank Heaven-do not ask their Presidents to be art critics. They have many assignments, but that is not one. But the American people do, I think, have a right to expect of their President that he will encourage the arts; that he will foster, in every way he can, the inventive spirit of his people. And that we have tried to do in our small way.

These years have been years of excitement and controversy and I think a great deal of constructive activity in our country. Some of

Mrs. Bess Abell, Social Secretary to the First Lady.

the liveliest activity, of course, has been in the arts-in the communities across the land; in the theaters and the galleries, the concert halls, and in our schools.

Part of that activity may be traced directly to the new commitment of government to the arts. Much of it, I am sure, can be traced to leadership such as Mr. Stevens', and to your dedication and to your enthusiasm.

I think that I know few men in public life that are deserving of more credit for service above and beyond the call of duty than Roger Stevens. I never thought that I would have the deep affection for him that I have after his wife harassed me with several thousand letters at one time about animals.

But I think now that Roger Stevens may be just the perfect public servant. Somehow or other he loves to do the impossible and most of us think he does it very well.

I like the record of achievement that he has written. In the twilight of our career here in Washington, the end of some 37 years, we have reviewed in retrospect-looked back at what has taken place and summarized some of the record and some of the things that we have gloried in, the achievements, and some of the disappointments. They have been legion.

But Sunday I went out and spent some time with a very great lady who was the father and the mother of Federal education, Mrs. Eugene Meyer. And when she first started harassing me about Federal aid to education-I use that word tenderly and affectionately, "harassing"we had about six education bills on the statutes of our land.

I want to just conclude by saying that we have had meetings on education, on health, on conservation and on 20 consumer measures that we have passed. And, yesterday, we had a meeting in here on the 22 measures that we have passed for our veterans-such as the GI education bill where hundreds of thousands are going through college when they return and take off their uniforms-22 major veterans bills.

NOTE: The President spoke at 6:36 p.m. in the East Room at the White House.

37. EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATION LEADERS

The President's Remarks on Being Honored for His Contributions in the Field of Education. December 27, 1968

Dr. Carr, ladies and gentlemen:

There is not much that I can or should say after those beautiful remarks.

When I was a boy growing up, my mother frequently had all the children around the family table make pronouncements about what they wanted to be in life-what they wanted to grow up to be. It was very apparent to me, even at that early age, that mother wanted me to be a teacher or a preacher or a public servant.

Both of my parents had been teachers. My grandfather and great grandfather had been teachers. So I guess that early training led me

into a teachers' college where I tried to prepare myself for the work that was ahead.

I enjoyed at least a few semesters in the college classroom with freshmen government students, in the high school where I acted as the principal, in the high school where I was the head of a department, and in the grade school that I really enjoyed most, where I worked with the poor Mexican children.

I had inculcated in me at a very early age the great importance of education, not only to our lives and to the happiness that we all sought and the advancement that we all desired, but the safety of our very system of government-because it doesn't make much difference how much brawn we have. If we don't balance it with brains, we will enjoy a certain insecurity.

The great President of our Republic of Texas, who emigrated there from Georgia, once said that education was the guardian genius of democracy. I have always felt that that was literally true; that if we are to guard and to be good trustees of this system of government, that while we are one of the youngest countries, we have one of the oldest systems of government-it has survived almost 200 years--we must have education.

I am very fearful that our efforts in that direction have been too minimal. They have been rather pathetic. You have had to have a good deal of charity in your heart to even belong to the teaching profession. We have shared relatively little of our resources and our wealth with the system of education which we rely on to protect our system of government.

We have tried to do something these last few years, and maybe have done some things-and I thank you, Doctor, for observing it—but we haven't even begun what needs to be done.

I was looking at a statement of the Secretary of the Interior this morning about the oil companies not believing in the oil shale development process enough to really make adequate bids on oil shale out in parts of our country.

I thought that if we could just take these resources, and all the other resources that are yet undeveloped, and somehow or other commit them to an education fund, how wonderful it would be.

We are not taking enough of our resources, of our gross national product, and committing it to the improvement of our minds, to the training of our children, to the preparation of our future citizens.

In elementary education, we passed the first bill in that field, but we are funding less than half of what the Congress has already committed and already authorized. I am not really proud of that. Although we are spending more than twice as much for education and health as we were just 5 years ago, that is moving along at a rapid clip, but not rapid enough.

So perhaps the country will look at their children-at their jewelsand agree that we ought to do more. That is what I hope they will agree

to.

I am going home to really do three things, and only three things. They have me building empires, sailing ships, flying planes, leading astronauts, and everything else. But I am just not going to do any of those things. And I am not going to retire, either.

The first thing I am going to do is to enjoy being lazy and enjoy being with Lady Bird for a while. She will get tired of me before very long. But we are going to sleep late and not be worried about what may be said here or there. We will just take things easy.

Then the next thing I am going to do is just read, read, read, and read. I have enough books from Christmas-I got seven volumes on George Washington. I would feel better this morning if I hadn't plowed through one of them as long as I did last night-but he had some of the same feelings about the Presidency that I have, and you like to find a fellow who agrees with you. So I am going to read.

Then when I get through reading, I hope to be able to do some writing and some teaching. Next year I am going to make relatively few appearances-six or seven-two or three at the universities, at Rice Institute, San Marcos, and maybe one or two up in this area.

But a great deal of my time is going to be spent with young people. I am going to try to inspire them, stimulate and create in them a desire to be teachers or preachers or public servants, because I think you can get a satisfaction in those endeavors that you can't find in many others.

I am so grateful to you for this very generous and very thoughtful act. I am not responsible for what has been done nearly as much as you people who have come here and knocked down the doors, twisted the arms, and tried to help us bring these programs to reality.

But I will be with you in spirit and in deed, too, in the days ahead, in trying to make our commitments secure and increase them.

Thank you.

Now I am going to run, because I am told I have less than two minutes until the splashdown. But when we think about our boys in Cambodian prisons coming home, the Pueblo crew being released, and the Apollo men just short of the culmination of our dreams, the economy where we are, and all that has happened to us this Christmas, we Americans ought to quit this business of just going around talking about everything being wrong, because so many wonderful things have come to us that we ought to count our blessings and be thankful for them and for each other-and I am for you teachers.

NOTE: The President spoke at 10:40 a.m. in the Cabinet Room at the White House. Dr. William G. Carr, formerly the Executive Secretary of the National Education Association' is Secretary General of the World Confederation of Organizations of Teaching Professions.

38. THE PRESIDENT'S NEWS CONFERENCE OF DECEMBER 27, 1968

EARMARKING OIL SHALE REVENUES FOR EDUCATION

Q. Mr. President, this morning you said something very interesting about using the oil shales as a possible resource for an education fund. Has anything specific been done to try to implement an idea like that? THE PRESIDENT. It hasn't been developed very much yet. You know what has been done about trying to kind of examine and explore to see if the processes we have, with the estimates and values we have-we don't know really what it is worth, how much it is worth, until we get some bids. The bids weren't very good.